pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

like a butt

yeah don't forget about butts

i never have

...i never have

"All but one of the comp’s nine tracks comes in under six minutes (with three topping the 10-minute mark)"

hmm

i checked my copy. the author definitely meant to write "only one of the comp's nine tracks comes in under six minutes (with three topping the 10-minute mark)"

how is it, by the way? i'm definitely intrigued.

it's very good. there's been some talk about it on the onyaebor thread and the world music thread.

"The sweetheart of the rodeo now works at a truck stop somewhere on Route 66, handing out the men’s room key and smiling crookedly to hide her missing teeth."

Is there some sort of apparatus that sends small but painful electrical shocks to the groin of anyone attempting to write sentences like these?

he asked hopefully

In its place is red-blood, full-throated, post-hippie country rock, right down to a name that evokes both Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead’s “Steel Magnolia”.

if someone could shop these together... much appreciated.

http://www.bomgar.com/assets/images/blog/Grateful_Dead_(617x409)_(2).jpg

http://www.impawards.com/1989/posters/steel_magnolias_xlg.jpg

"Steel Magnolia"? Never heard that song. Any good?

The Grateful Dead feat. Dolly Parton & Sally Field

lol

Interesting thread 'cause of the behind-the-scenes stuff. I signed up for an account here *years* ago - I can find one post from 2006, in praise of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators' electric jug - and have lurked since then because I forgot my password. I'm genuinely surprised that Pitchfork pays its writers anything at all. I had always assumed the writers did it for the thrill of being in Pitchfork. Which is silly. The Chicago Sun-Times was all about Roger Ebert; Pitchfork is about Pitchfork. Thinking about online records reviews sent me into a nostalgic reverie (echo effect... screen swirls... Manny Mota... Mota... Mota...)

See, from 1998-2002 or so I supported myself as a writer here in the UK - London, obviously - working initially as a freelancer and then as a full-time internet copywriter, because in those days they would hire anybody if you knew how to spell HTML. I can remember my first paycheque (£75, which went towards a double-speed CD burner), my largest (£1,500), then landing a small book deal, and I remember wondering whether I should do something about tax. Or if I should just not bother.

I have no emotional investment in Pitchfork one way or the other. The company is clearly doing something right to have lasted so long, despite having relatively modest resources. My impression is that the writing (e.g. the Arcade Fire review mentioned above) is very bland and aspires to a kind of High Seriousness that will date badly, but this could be a US/UK thing at work; in my experience US rock writing tends to have a reverent tone, whereas in the UK we are irreverent nihilists. That Arcade Fire review would have been totally out of place in a British publication. And so I'm probably not the right person to judge Pitchfork, it's just alien to everything I know. It's aimed at a different audience, and in any case reviews from 2004 were aimed at the audience of 2004.

Think of all the record reviews that appeared in the NME and Melody Maker and The Face throughout the 1980s and 1990s - they were written for The Moment, and their success or failure was determined by how effectively they shaped The Moment, and they're just meaningless nowadays and no-one re-reads them. This hung heavy on my heart back in 2000; I've never been interested in The Moment, but as a writer you have to pretend to be sincerely fascinated in every new novelty as if it was the best thing evah and the entirety of human history was irrelevant in comparison. I grew up reading books, dammit, I'm used to long-form writing, which is very time-consuming. The edit phase is just as crucial as the writing phase but harder, because the fire has gone out, I'm burning fat instead of sugar. It's as if God has given me the skills and temperament for long-form writing but no motivation to actually write lengthy pieces. It's a lot of work for no reward. But not as difficult or as worthless as having to *read* it, amirite? Eh? (swigs from bottle)

In the end I gave it up. A friend of a friend worked for the railways in a ticket office. His job was much less glamorous than mine, but his paycheques were more regular than mine, and when he went home each Friday he was reasonably confident that he would have a job on Monday. Also, he got to wear a neat uniform. The "glamour" of writing is an illusion, and it's probably an illusion even if you're Will Self or Nick Hornby. Besides, in 2000 the top magazines and newspapers in the UK really wanted multimedia personalities rather than writers.

2000 was very early days internet-wise - I remember there still seemed to be a lot of smaller review sites, little individual islands, rather than a handful of colossi in the mould of the Onion's AV Club and indeed Pitchfork. You can see a residue of this in the IMDB's review section for films released in the early 2000s, where they still list tonnes of old pre-blog, one-or-two-man cinema review websites (Stomp Tokyo etc). At the time I had a sense that the days of one-man websites were passing in favour of professional, large-scale content generators, and that eventually the cost and difficulty of creating an individual website would make self-publishing impossible, and that the internet's voices would consolidate until the internet was indistinguishable from the world of traditional publishing. I didn't anticipate the rise of blogs, but they're still subject to the same forces, the same drive towards consolidation.

I'm surprised to learn that Stylus didn't exist in 2000. I remember Freaky Trigger though. I was an arrogant tosser, and never considered submitting any writing to it because I'd written for paper magazines that paid actual money which made me God and Freaky Trigger was just a website ner ner. I remember there was an ongoing debate as to the future of content back then. One side held that the internet would create a vast new market for writing, another side argued that the money was really to be made from platforms rather than content, and the reality seemed to be a lot of unpaid user-generated content, bot-generated blogs, review aggregators, with lower rates or no rates at all. Everybody would be writing to publicise something else, but where would it end? There's no point writing an unpaid blog to publicise your free e-book that advertises the workshop that you're not being paid for. Or worse, you're paying to attend a convention so you can advertise the book that you self-published at your own expense that summarised the workshops that cost you a fortune to hire the venue for etc.

It seemed to me that the future of online content wasn't going to have a place for long-form writing, 'cause the internet is pan-lingual and nobody wants to read huge chunks of text on their computer. And at the time in 2000 there was no practical way to read articles in a mobile context, and the market for record reviews was going to be tiny (the bigger labels didn't give a shit about the internet in 2000 - pricks - and the smaller labels never had any money). I saw the future of online publishing as a ten-page article with five pictures of Charlie Dimmock or Kylie Minogue or the So Solid Crew etc per page, and you had to click ten times to go through it, and the only writing was a bunch of captions. A bit like Buzzfeed or Reddit. A future that didn't need writers; the content would always come from *somewhere else* and the churn rate was such that (as Cracked has demonstrated) you can just repeat the same basic idea, almost the exact same content, and still win lots of hits.

At the back of my mind it struck me that publishing has always been like this, ever since the Victorian age, probably before then. The internet basically operates on the level of Sunday magazines, which have always been a lot of adverts with adverts in between the adverts. Writers very rarely make a go of it for long; the big writers are oftentimes self-important frauds who are in debt to their eyeballs, and the genuine success stories of the last two decades really made their money from selling the film rights... but even then, the process goes back until the dawn of Hollywood. Stretching back through J K Rowling to Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, I surmise that Arthur Conan Doyle had to fend off radio producers. Were there semaphore plays, smoke signal serials in medieval times? Roman writers who were appalled that some playwright had turned his clever treatise on society into a lot of stabbings and naked breasts? Caveman hunters who were irritated that the cave paintings were a distortion of the reality of hunting? Hmm?

I think ultimately success in writing is a bit like success in Formula One racing. You can fake it by buying a place in a team but you still have to work at least hard enough to avoid being a hazard - most of The Guardian's writers are like this, they're b-list writers who can churn out a column and have the right contacts but would fail totally for the most part on their own. For most writers you need lots of hard work and practice to succeed. And you need to keep plugging at it, *but* demoralisingly unless you live near a race track and your dad is personal friends with a team boss you're not like to get a chance. A broken leg can topple you at any time, and if you want to be a national figure you have to accept that you need an infrastructure around you, an investment, and you're not going to get that unless you can convince people that you're going all the way to the FA Cup. And ultimately your job will consist mostly of filling out forms, with very little time for writing.

That's what happened to Douglas Adams, isn't it? He ended up having to fill out lots of forms, and he got bored and stopped writing as a consequence. And then he got bored with life and disappeared - I don't buy the official story at all.

+

post more things on ILX, Ashley Pomeroy

-

and I remember wondering whether I should do something about tax. Or if I should just not bother.
you may be going to jail

wow great post

ya

depressing, tho

im an optimist bc, really, what's the worst that can happen. i die? its happening one day anyway

i don't identify w/ that post at all, ha

whereas in the UK we are irreverent nihilists.

if by this you mean "whereas in the UK we are credulous, as proved by our six stars out of five reviews of early Oasis albums," sure you're nihilists.

This isn't an new move; although their last record had a handful of great keyboard moments—

The Weeknd's House of Balloons is one of the more influential records of this decade, but thanks to Solange Knowles, “alt-R&B” would have happened without it.

i like solange ok and like what she stands for or whatever, yay integration yay gene flow, but i swear the way some talk about her you'd think she was herman cain sometimes

Solange would do a cool version of "Imagine There's No Pizza"

there's yr next benoit & sergio single

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18683-future-of-the-left-how-to-stop-your-brain-in-an-accident/

i guess this band's frontman's nickname is "Falco," but the review only refers to him by that, never his full name or any other exposition/description, so it's very easy to read it like "the 'Rock Me Amadeus' guy? i thought he was dead."

That is his surname.

his name is Falkous and 'Falco' is a nickname -- but even so just referring to a band member by their surname and only that in a review would be a lil weird

Oh yeah.

in the UK we are irreverent nihilists.

this really is hilarious

i mean, i wish!

"you will never have another boss like me. Someone who's basically a chilled-out entertainer."

http://i.imgur.com/6UcORa7.png

two separate people give an album a different score 11 years apart?!?!

Crazy shit I know. Were you sitting down when you opened this thread

i am now

well sure. but there's been a lot of talk about how ratings are discussed/decided from the top down, and the author of the first review still owns the site and presumably wouldn't have run the second one if he wasn't okay with the implicit rebuke of his old opinion. which i think is more a good thing than a dumb thing overall but w/e. xp

ya whats wrong with changing your mind, how obnoksh would it be if they insisted on holding and defending all their old dumb opinions

if it got changed like, a week later, that would be a bad look

Man an ILX where it's not ok to laugh at the Schreibs is an ILX I am a stranger to

I think we're supposed to focus on the fact that Century Media put out the reissue, you guys.

yeah the difference in score is not what's silly, it just shows up their top-down hivebrand strategy as silly

also, they got it right first time

if it got changed like, a week later, that would be a bad look

― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, November 20, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They actually did that for Sufjan Stevens' Michigan album. Original review gave it an OK score and they came back a couple weeks later and ran an all-new review after the album caught on with the rest of the editorial team.

'90s Pitchfork may not be a fair target, but really... http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1319-the-cars-deluxe-edition/

"And listening to The Cars: Deluxe Edition, you can see why interest feigned."

And listened they did

I'm glad some of those classic early reviews are still archived here and there even if they've been expunged from pitchfork itself

Other tracks show the band getting overly playful-- when the drumbeat changes toward the end of the classic single "Just What I Needed," it throws the song off course and steals some of the glory from its anthemic feel.

See, the Cars were great in their time. The scene needed them. They bridged the gap between the Ramones and Elvis Costello.

O RLY?